Chaos, catastrophes and engineering: Applying chaos theory to engineering may seem odd. We expect machines and structures to operate with clockwork predictability. But engineers are now discovering that a sudden disaster may mean there's a fractal in the

IN FEBRUARY 1974, the Gaul, a trawler from Hull, disappeared in heavy seas off the coast of Norway with the loss of 36 lives. The inquiry into the disaster found that there was nothing wrong with the ship's design: the stability of the vessel against capsize conformed with all required standards. One possible explanation put forward for the loss of the vessel was that it capsized as the result of some transient phenomenon when hit broadside by a short succession of abnormally large waves.

'Transient phenomenon' means that the vessel was moving in an irregular fashion: rocking, swaying, pitching, heaving and rolling. A trawler in a storm is obviously tossed around, so any capsize caused by waves hitting a vessel is a transient phenomenon. Strangely, though, the methods that engineers use to assess how stable a ship is assume that the ship is totally motionless. The methods simply require that ...

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